Two days later they were landing on Field 1,987,806 United States Army Engineers, Unmanned, half an hour"s jaunt from United States Experimental Station 3,002.
Ole Doc let Hippocrates slide the ladder out and stood for a moment in the air lock, black kit in hand. The jungle was about three hundred feet above the edges of the field, a wild and virulent jungle, dark green with avid growing and yellow with its rotting dead. For a little s.p.a.ce there was complete silence while the chattering gusts of the land- ing jets echoed out and left utter stillness. And then the jungle came awake once more with screams and catcalls and a ground-shaking aa-um.
Hippocrates skittered back up the ladder. He stopped at the top. Again sounded the aa-um and the very plates of the old ship shook with it. Hippocrates went inside and came back with a hundred and ten millimeter turret cannon cradled comfortably over his two right arms.
Ole Doc threw a switch which put an alpha force field around the ship to keep wild animals off and, with a final glance at the tumbled wrecks of buildings which had once housed a military post, descended the ladder and strolled after Hippocrates into the thick growth.
Now and then Hippocrates c.o.c.ked an antenna at the towering branches overhead and stopped suspiciously. But he could see nothing threatening and he relieved his feel- ings occasionally by sending a big gout of fire from the 110 to sizzle them out a straight trail and calcine the mud to brick hardness.
Aa-um shook the jungle. And each time it sounded the myriad of animal and bird noises fell still for a moment.
Hippocrates was about to send another shot ahead when Ole Doc stopped him. An instant later a grey-faced Irishman with wild welcome in his eyes broke through the sawtrees to clasp Ole Doc in emotional arms.
"I"m O"Hara. Thank G.o.d I got through. Receiver"s been out for six months. Didn"t know if I was getting a signal out. Thank G.o.d you"ve come!" And he closed for another embrace but Ole Doc forestalled him by calling attention to the aa-um which had just sounded once more.
"Oh that!" said O"Hara. "That"s a catbeast. Big and worry enough when I"ve got time to worry about them.
Oh, for the good old days when all I had to worry about was the catbeast getting my cattle and mesohawks my sheep. But now-" And he started off ahead of them at a dead run, beckoning them to hasten after him.
They had two close calls from swooping birds as big as ancient bombers and almost took a header over a tree trunk ten feet through which turned out to be a snake
rising from the ooze with big, hungry teeth. But they arrived in a moment at the station all in one piece.
"You"ve got to understand," panted O"Hara when he found Ole Doc wouldn"t run any faster, "that I"m the only man here. I have some Achnoids, of course, but you would not call those octopi company even if they can talk and do manual labor. But I"ve been here on Gorgon for fifteen years and I never had anything like this happen before. I am supposed to make this planet habitable in case Earth ever wants a colony planted. This is an agricul- tural and animal husbandry station. I"m supposed to make things easy for any future colonist. But no colonists have come so far and I don"t blame them. This Savannah here is the coolest place on the planet and yet it"s hot enough.
But I haven"t got an a.s.sistant or anyone and so when this happened-"
"Well, come on, man," said Ole Doc. "What has hap- pened."
"You"ll see!" cried O"Hara, getting wild-eyed with ex- citement and concern once more. "Come along."
They entered a compound which looked like a fortress.
It sat squarely in the center of a huge gra.s.sy field, the better to have its animal targets in the open when they attacked and the better to graze its livestock. As they pa.s.sed through the gate, O"Hara carefully closed it behind him.
Ole Doc looked incuriously at the long lines of sheds, at the helio motors above each and the corrals where fat cattle grazed. A greenhouse caught his interest because he saw that an Achnoid, who more closely resembled a blue pinwheel than a man, was weeding valuable medicinal herbs from out of, as Ole Doc saw it, worthless carrots.
But O"Hara dragged him on through the noisy heat and dust of the place until they stood at Shed Thirteen.
"This is the lion shed," said O"Hara.
"Interesting," said Ole Doc disinterestedly.
O"Hara opened the door. A long row of vats lined each side of the pa.s.sage and the sound of trickling fluid was soothing as it ran from one to the next. A maze of intricate gla.s.s tubing interconnected one vat to the next and a blank-beaked Achnoid was going around twiddling valves and reading temperatures.
"Hm-m-m," said Ole Doc. "Artificial birthing vats."
"Yes, yes. To be sure!" cried O"Hara in wild agreement,
happy that he was getting some understanding. "That"s the way we get our stock. Earth sends me sperm and ovums in static ray preservation and I put them into the vats and bring them to maturity. Then we take them out of the vats and put them on artificial udders and we have calves and lambs and such. But this is the lion shed."
"The what?" said Ole Doc.
"For the lions," said O"Hara. "We find that carefully selected and properly evoluted Earth lions kill catbeasts and several other kinds of vermin. I"ve got the deserts to the south of here crawling with lions and some day we"ll be rid of catbeasts."
"And then you"ll have lions," said Ole Doc.
"Oh no," said O"Hara impatiently. "Then we"ll bacteria- cide the lions with a plague. Which is to say I will. There isn"t any we. I"ve been here for fifteen years-"
"Well, maybe you"ve been here for fifteen years," said Ole Doc without much sympathy, "but why am I here?"
"Oh. It"s the last cargo. They send my stuff up here in tramps. Unreliable freight. Last year a tramp came in with a cargo for me and she had some kind of director trouble and had to jettison all her freight. Well, I didn"t have any stevedores and they just left it in the rain and the labels came off a lot of the boxes-"
"Ah!" said Ole Doc. "You want me to recla.s.sify sperm-"
"No, no, no!" said O"Hara. "Some of these cargoes were intended for some other experimental station I am sure. But I have no lading bills for the stuff. I don"t know.
And I"m frantic! I-"
"Well come down to it," said Ole Doc. "WHAT is your problem?"
Dramatically O"Hara approached the first vat and gave the cover a yank. The pulleys creaked. Lights went on and the gla.s.s bowls within glowed.
In this one vat there were five human babies.
Ole Doc pushed the cover up further and looked. These babies were near the end of their gestation period and were, in other words, about ready to be born. They seemed to be all complete, hair, fingernails, with the proper number of fingers and toes and they were obviously very comfortable.
"Well?" said Ole Doc, looking down the endless rows of vats.
"All of them," said O"Hara weakly.
"And they number-?" said Ole Doc.
"About eighteen thousand," said O"Hara.
"Well, if THIS is your problem," said Ole Doc, "I would suggest a hurry-up to the Department of Agricul- ture back on Earth. You need, evidently, half an army corps of nurses. But as for the problem of getting these babies-"
"Oh, that isn"t it!" said O"Hara. "You see, it"s these condemned Achnoids. They"re so confounded routine in everything they do. And I guess maybe it"s my fault, too, because there are so many details on this station that if one Earthman had to listen to them all and arrange them every day he would go crazy. So I guess I"m pretty humpy with them-the ambulating pinwheels! Well, this is the lion shed. We turn out eighteen thousand lions every three months, that being our charted gestation period. Then they go into the pits where they are fed by a facsimile lioness udder and finally they are booted out into the wilderness to go mop up catbeasts. All that is very simple.
But these Achnoids-"
"When did you learn about this?"
"Oh, almost six months ago. But I wasn"t terribly both- ered. Not right then. I just sent a routine report to Earth.
But these Achnoids go right on with routine work unless something stops them. And the labels were all mixed up on that jettison shipment and they picked up phials marked with our code number for lions and dumped them into these vats. That"s their routine work in this department.
That"s the only way we could ship cattle and such things, you see, because I don"t think you"d like to travel on a cattle s.p.a.ceship, would you? And it would be expensive, what with the price of freight. And we need lots of stock.
So to avoid shipping such things as these lions-"
"I"d think it was to be avoided," said Ole Doc wryly.
"-we"ve developed a very highly specialized system of handling and marking. And evidently our codes aren"t identical with the codes at the intended destination of these babies. There"s an awful lot of paper work comes off Earth about this sort of thing and frankly I didn"t even know they were shipping babies by this system. I went back through all my reports but I must have misfiled something because there isn"t anything on it which I"ve received. Well-"
"You said you messaged the department," said Ole Doc.
"Oh, heck. You know government like it is these days.